The Guide to Capturing Images

As I work on IGPX month, a friend of mine complemented me on the images I have been capturing and uploading and asked how to capture images from DVDs. After I gave him the run down, a thought occurred to me as I searched the site and found no real guide to explain how one goes about getting screen shots and capturing images from video hosting sites and what not. Seeing as how I don't have much to do during the summer except read this technique book for teaching, I have decided to make another guide covering the basics on how to capture images when watching something via YouTube, Crunchy Roll, Anime Season, Hulu, or your site of choice. It should be noted that this process also works with DVDs you play on your computer. It is recommended though that you watch the videos in a small window as it will make the image easier to capture. Not to mention if you do it full screen, you usually get nothing at all.

Step One: Find an image.

This is always going to be the easy step since all you have to do is find a scene in the anime or manga that looks good and would make for a good image here on the site. For this example, we are going to use a clip from YouTube from episode 2 of Fairy Tail. Once you find a scene you want, hit the pause button. Make sure there are no time counters or subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Subtitles are okay but if you want a good, clean image, its best to try and avoid subtitles. Next hit the Print Screen button, which is abbreviated to 'Prnt Scrn'. It is usually above the Backspace bar and to the right. (I didn't put an image here since not all keyboard are alike)

Open Microsoft Paint or whatever graphics program you use. At the top of the screen hit the edit button and then scroll down until you see the Paste button. Hit them both accordingly. The screen shot you captures should pop up. The image below has red arrows to guide you along.

Edit and Paste are marked by the red arrows.

Step Three: Save the Image

Pretty easy step here. Simply go to File. Then go to Save As. When you are saving, make sure that you are saving it to Pictures where you can edit the image further.

Step Four: Go to Pictures and Find Your Image

Hit the Start button in the bottom left hand corner of your screen then scroll up to the left. You should see Pictures on the left. Click on it, find your image, then open it.

Follow the arrow. It'll guide you.

Step Five: Click on the Fix Button

The Fix button is at the top of the screen. Simply click on that to open up the crop menu. When you have the crop menu open, click on the icon that says "Crop Image". A rectangle will pop up for you to crop. Outline the image you want to crop and then click apply.

The Fix button is what you are looking for at the top.

First click the red arrow. Then move the rectangle to your liking (as seen in the red circle). Then click apply at the blue arrow.

Step Six: You're Done. Upload to Anime Vice

After you click Apply, your changes will be saved and you have a perfect screen shot. If you are unhappy with how it looks, click "Crop Image" or "Undo" to go back and attempt to crop the image to your liking again. Once you are done, either exit out of the editor or click on one of the arrows at the bottom of the screen and your work will be saved. After that, head on over to Anime Vice or any Whiskey Media site and upload the image.

@thuiscool: You are right that full screen can give you a higher resolution, but I found there were some times problems with capping full screen. With the DVDs I have been watching, if I go full screen and tried to capture an image, all I would get is a black image with nothing on it. Half screen has worked for me for the longest time and the images usually come out looking good.

Step #1: Hold down Command/Shift and press 4 (It should make a small cross icon appear with numbers on the lower right side of it).

Step #2: Click and drag the cross icon across the area that you wish to capture (Draw the transparent box over said image that you wish to capture).

Step #3: When you have finished selecting your area, simply let go of the mouse and it will take a image of the highlighted area that you selected. If your speakers are on, you will hear the photo being "taken" with the click of a camera. The image will appear on your desktop as a PNG file.

Step #4: You can either open the image in Preview and save as a JPEG file or simply upload it as a PNG file to AnimeVice.

There are some programs that will let you setup a hot key where if you press a button it will take a screen cap and save it as a .jpg or other format in a folder you specify on your HDD. Those are pretty nice plus they circumvent the DVD black screen issue.

Also, that's really not the best way to to get the image from the screen capture. Save it in paint and then open and re-save in another program? Why do that when you can just crop it in paint before saving? You can zoom in to make sure you don't crop any pixels out and it won't be jpeg-compressed twice.

@thuiscoolsaid:

Very cool, but I tend to go into full screen the video, then print scn. gives a larger resolution image.

No... you shouldn't do that either. That will blow the image up and make it blurrier than it would be at it's correct size.

@sickVisionz said:

There are some programs that will let you setup a hot key where if you press a button it will take a screen cap and save it as a .jpg or other format in a folder you specify on your HDD. Those are pretty nice plus they circumvent the DVD black screen issue.

This is the best way to capture images. Granted, you need either a disc copy or a downloaded copy, but really those are the sources you should be using for screen caps. This is a wiki site and ideally we want nice, big, clear screen caps.

What program do you use? Hold on, I found your info on Halberdierv2's Gosick blog.

SickVisionZ's quote:

Also, at 7 hours part of me think maybe you're doing something in a less than ideal way. Here's my process:

Printscreen program. This is key. I use a free one called Gadwin PrintScreen. You can assign the function to a hotkey and it'll take a quick .jpg. It's pretty fast two. I can hammer on it like 3+ times a second during an action scene and it keeps up with me and doesn't bog my computer down either.

If you need to resize stuff (like maybe you're only watching a 480p stream and the quality drops when you take a full screen capture), I use a free program called PhotoScape. It's got some issue as a pro picture editor (no layers) but it's batch processing is the easiest I've seen. I can drag a full folder of stuff and within 4 or 5 clicks it's running on it's own.

Do any of these programs save time by cropping images easily and edit out subtitles and watermarks? I trying to abandon my old way of hunting for images. I used to use youtube or crunchyroll to take screen shots when an anime scene's subs disappear. I haven't learn how disable subs in crunchyroll yet. I have to dodge subtitles for my screen shots.

@takashichea: super yes for cropping. You can drag and entire folder of pics into the batch editor and crop out what you want. You'll see a preview of what one image will look like while you're changing the settings. Once you like that, just hit a button and it will run that same process on every image you dragged into it. It takes like 10-20 seconds on my computer and I'm usually doing like 100+ images when I resize stuff.

On Crunchyroll you should be able to right click on the video feed while it plays and in the list of options you should see an option for "No Subtitles" which you can turn on and off at will.

Shows on CR that aren't simulcasts will sometimes have subtitles as a permanent part of the video and can't be turned off (actually 100% of the ones that I've seen). None of their shows that they simulcast seem to have this though.

@Newten: You are right that internet videos tend not to be high quality, but I beg to differ in that you just have to find the right ones since there are times I pulled images from internet videos. As well as I didn't realize that there was a water mark in the example until after the fact so that was a mistake on my part. You are also right that you can save a step by doing it all in Paint but any time I use the crop tool in Paint, it decides to act crazy and not cooperate. I have found the crop tool in Windows Picture Viewer to be a lot easier to use and less temperamental. I put it like that in the guide since its easy for me to do it as well as its meant as a stepping stone for anyone who has never tackled capturing images before.

@ShadowKnight508: Thanks for putting up directions for Mac users. I admit that when I posted it, I went "Oh crap, I forgot that Windows and Mac use completely different tools and systems."

Thanks! I will download that program and try it out. The cropping part sounds awesome.

For subs, I never realize that right clicking a video to turn off the subs. Thanks for the tip. For the older episodes, I guess I have to dodge subs since it's permanent, but I'm used to it.

I guess that explains why Anna always upload so many Fairy Tail images on the same day that Fairy Tail's new episode occurs. For the new animes, I have to schedule a time to get the best opportunity to get no subs images on the day of a new episode.

There are some programs that will let you setup a hot key where if you press a button it will take a screen cap and save it as a .jpg or other format in a folder you specify on your HDD. Those are pretty nice plus they circumvent the DVD black screen issue.

Really, can you tell me what the program name is? (That would help me a lot)

@sickVisionz: okay I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use photoscape to crop multiple images at one time, I go into the batch editor, add the photos i want to edit, and there's no way I can select what area I want to crop.

@Wales: Oh no, I know there are decent streams out there, but they're still usually low-res. You can get 720p with a paid crunchyroll membership, but I imagine that stuff is still watermarked so that's no good. And dude don't need to use the crop tool in paint. Just zoom in by like 400%, drag the anime cap into the top left corner and then drag the bottom and right of the canvas until you have just the anime cap. Super easy.